diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v2.0.0.rst b/doc/source/whatsnew/v2.0.0.rst
index 9d654439273a6..56b4e8ae851eb 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v2.0.0.rst
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v2.0.0.rst
@@ -323,6 +323,7 @@ MultiIndex
 I/O
 ^^^
 - Bug in :func:`read_sas` caused fragmentation of :class:`DataFrame` and raised :class:`.errors.PerformanceWarning` (:issue:`48595`)
+- Improved error message in :func:`read_excel` by including the offending sheet name when an exception is raised while reading a file (:issue:`48706`)
 - Bug when a pickling a subset PyArrow-backed data that would serialize the entire data instead of the subset (:issue:`42600`)
 - Bug in :func:`read_csv` for a single-line csv with fewer columns than ``names`` raised :class:`.errors.ParserError` with ``engine="c"`` (:issue:`47566`)
 -
diff --git a/pandas/io/excel/_base.py b/pandas/io/excel/_base.py
index 994887f487473..92a0326eac4e9 100644
--- a/pandas/io/excel/_base.py
+++ b/pandas/io/excel/_base.py
@@ -863,6 +863,10 @@ def parse(
                 # No Data, return an empty DataFrame
                 output[asheetname] = DataFrame()
 
+            except Exception as err:
+                err.args = (f"{err.args[0]} (sheet: {asheetname})", *err.args[1:])
+                raise err
+
         if ret_dict:
             return output
         else:
diff --git a/pandas/tests/io/excel/test_readers.py b/pandas/tests/io/excel/test_readers.py
index 16fbf54bbe394..497d8f83de33b 100644
--- a/pandas/tests/io/excel/test_readers.py
+++ b/pandas/tests/io/excel/test_readers.py
@@ -624,6 +624,13 @@ def test_read_excel_blank_with_header(self, read_ext):
         actual = pd.read_excel("blank_with_header" + read_ext, sheet_name="Sheet1")
         tm.assert_frame_equal(actual, expected)
 
+    def test_exception_message_includes_sheet_name(self, read_ext):
+        # GH 48706
+        with pytest.raises(ValueError, match=r" \(sheet: Sheet1\)$"):
+            pd.read_excel("blank_with_header" + read_ext, header=[1], sheet_name=None)
+        with pytest.raises(ZeroDivisionError, match=r" \(sheet: Sheet1\)$"):
+            pd.read_excel("test1" + read_ext, usecols=lambda x: 1 / 0, sheet_name=None)
+
     @pytest.mark.filterwarnings("ignore:Cell A4 is marked:UserWarning:openpyxl")
     def test_date_conversion_overflow(self, request, engine, read_ext):
         # GH 10001 : pandas.ExcelFile ignore parse_dates=False